When I left the States, originally for Belize, I left behind my darkroom. In these years, I have nearly forgotten the artist side of myself because of this, and most new friends do not even know it existed in the first place.
It has now been nearly 3 years without, and, little by little, I am rebuilding. My new country of Mexico is inspirational in this, or maybe it is far too much time passed, maybe both. In the meantime and during these years, I have resorted to iphone images and my old digital camera to help me get by... tools I was never fond of as a darkroom artist. But I played around and explored what I had, and digital image-making sufficed as a tool. These are a few of those explorations.
Conceptually, the common thread within much of this is water and the tropics. First living on a small island of only a few miles in length, surrounded and engulfed by water, I found an incredible ignition of creative energy. Matching that with personal traumas, missing my North Carolina and family... It was a complex and emotionally charged time. These images speak to this, as well as the transitional phase of leaving island life and a period of mental and physical abuse behind me, bound for Mexico, again alone, but with strong and healthy hopes in front of me.
I will continue this series; an ongoing journey I suppose will never end. I do not want it to. The title, Inland Sea, was inspired by a single line from David Mitchell's book The Bone Clocks: "I felt like a minnow being tipped from a jar into a deep inland sea." That idea moved me - The negative and positive connotation of the unknown, that feeling of terror, that feeling of freedom.